Google Instant kind of caught me by surprise. My first reaction/question was; How will this affect insurance marketing SEO efforts? There are a lot of folks in the insurance business investing lots of money in SEO to increase search rank, search traffic, and to generate insurance leads via an internet marketing strategy. I’m one of them so I wanted to find out how this seemingly big change impacts our collective effort.
The first thing you’ll notice is that you no longer have to hit enter on your keyboard while searching which could save you a couple of seconds per search and more as you get better at searching and instant search is designed to make you a better searcher by giving you instant feedback on your request which you can change on the fly. According to Search Engine Watch “Google is now not only leading searchers to the answer but also to the question itself”.
How this could be of great benefit to those of us who market on a local level is long-tail key words vv. short-tail key words. A example of a short-tail key word would be Auto Insurance and an example of a log-tail key word would be Auto Insurance Mission Viejo. The biggest difference is short-tail words have more people searching but because the nature of short in this case is less specific, the leads are less qualified. Long-tail words have fewer searchers but by their nature are more specific and therefore the leads are usually more qualified. The good news for local insurance marketers is the market is wide open for long-tail key words and again, leads generated from long-tail key words convert to sales at a much higher rate than leads generated as a result of short-tail key-words.